All the Brooks and Soldiers
by JWWells
Summary: A riddle-obsessed physicist has been killed, and police cadet Ema Skye, his niece, is the sole suspect. As a fatal verdict draws closer, Klavier, Ema, and Franziska find themselves trapped in a race that cannot be won - a Red Queen's Race. The reader is challenged to solve the mystery. Kristoph Gavin, the narrator, guarantees absolutely fair play - and he wouldn't lie, would he?
1. Vignettes 20, 13, and 8

**Vignette 20: A Challenge to the Reader**

A witness collapses across the evidence bench, clutching at his bloodied chest. As he falls, he knocks a globe to the floor. It lands on China.

There's no outcry, no pandemonium in the gallery. After all, the gallery is empty, and everyone taking part in the trial is too stunned to speak. The moment seems to spin in aimless circles as the globe rolls to a stop. Then Franziska von Karma barks an order:

"An ambulance! Bailiff, get an ambulance!"

The courtroom springs to frantic life. Let them go for a few seconds...

...Then _pause_. Catch it all in freeze frame. Don't rush to search for clues all at once. First, admire the renovated architecture. Scrutinize the neat moldings on the benches, which Phoenix Wright never got to stand behind owing to his recent disbarment. And reflect on the silver lining of this catastrophe: thanks to what's about to happen, Klavier Gavin will grow suspicious of his wicked brother, and will prevent him from committing a murder or two. That's nice, isn't it?

Finish your reflections. What's everyone up to right now?

 _Franziska von Karma_ is checking for a pulse...

...and palpating the wrist of the _fallen witness_ , the young man twitching on the evidence bench...

 _..._ while the _Judge's gavel_ is upraised, ready to slam down, mostly out of habit...

...and _Ema Skye,_ the defendant, is creeping forward from the defense bench, afraid to see the worst..

...with her _defense attorney_ walking a little ahead of her...

...as _Vincent Omnia_ hangs frozen in mid-leap, lunging forward from the witness stand...

...while, at the same time, _the bailiff_ is making for the door...

...while an injured _Klavier Gavin_ ducks into an adjacent room to hide.

There are six people in this entire wing of the courthouse: a defense attorney, a prosecutor, a witness, a defendant, a bailiff, and a judge.

A contradiction? Surely I got something wrong? Of course not.

The victim in this case loved puzzles to the point of obsession, so it's fitting that his death happens to be a puzzle itself. Somehow, Klavier has always held my quick solution of the whole matter against me, but this is unfair, almost objectively so. After all, I'm sure you'll be able to solve it as well. Won't you?

If there are no objections, I'll take the position of an omniscient narrator. Not out of arrogance, but simply because a story flows more smoothly when one grasps the motivations of the characters. Where inner thoughts are unclear, I'll adduce plausible ones to fill in the gaps. A few inventions either way don't matter now. I could tell you exactly what happened with perfect objectivity, and my brother would still object to the story being told at all.

"People died to keep these secrets," he'd say. "Please, think of the poor doctor!"

But as well-furnished as my cell is, I've little else to do now (and whose fault is _that?_ ), so let's begin with all due haste. I've numbered these vignettes chronologically, as far as such a thing is possible.

 **Vignette 13: My Brother Takes on Ema Skye's Defense**

"What?" said Klavier, voice still clouded with sleep.

"This is a rare opportunity," I patiently repeated, "a chance to see the courtroom from the other side. Ordinarily, you'd never have a chance to be a defense attorney. To understand how and why we do what we do, and use that to your advantage."

"Mph. And this isn't just because you want me to follow in your footsteps."

"Never," I replied, quite sincerely. "Your life is your own. I wouldn't interfere for all the world."

A long pause. Klavier was doubtless mulling over the interference I made in his educational, legal, and musical careers. But he was younger then, and hadn't even passed the bar. As a sibling, urging him to not waste his gifts on three chords and the State had been the least I could do. "I'm serious," I added. "I only offer because a key figure in this trial, the brother of an old client, _demanded_ a Gavin, and I'm too busy working out our inheritance problems to take the case." My loyalty to Henry and Vincent was more than mere professional pride.

"...Thank you for that, by the way," said Klavier. We had argued in tedious depth over which lawyer sibling should dispose of the minutiae of executing our mother's inheritance, but in the end, I had yielded and agreed to do so myself. Klavier was already engaged for a concert, you see. "But they'll really let me do this, you think?" He laughed. "I'm better at disbarring defense attorneys than being one!"

"Well, they don't expect you to be Phoenix Wright..."

"No," said Klavier. "I'd be honest. And at least halfway _competent_."

 _Sigh._ I'd told him again and again not to say such things. "Wright was a good man who yielded to temptation once - only once, as far as we know. He was something of a hero to me! It pains me that you disparage him so."

Another grumbling pause. "He doesn't deserve you, bro. But fine, I'll do it. For Skye, at least. You're sure they can keep this trial secret?"

"By military order from the Department of Homeland Intelligence and Security. The technology involved is so sensitive that any leak, no matter how small, could be disastrous to national security."

"Cool, cool. These lips are zipped tighter than the rivets on Iron Golym's sweet bass." I loved my little brother, but he was an embarrassment sometimes.

"Then get dressed and go speak to the defendant in custody. If you may, get their permission to have your phone on and set to speaker."

Klavier raised an eyebrow. This wasn't a video call, but I'm certain he was doing just that. "You going to babysit me the whole time?"

"Not babysit. Advise. As the merest fledgling of a student aide might."

And that was a promise.

The detention center guards waved Klavier through the security gates, fussing over him to make sure he wasn't carrying a gun - though, frankly, he'd have been more likely to shoot himself with one than to hit a moose reliably. He chatted with the guards breezily, in spite of not knowing either of their names (Cameron and Stills), and was soon seated on the safer side of a Plexiglas window.

"I'm a little nervous, to be honest," Klavier confided.

"You'll be fine. How hard could it be? I manage it," I told him, "and I'm not even smart enough to write those wild chord progressions."

"Ahh, that's not so -"

A door creaked open, and defendant Ema Skye entered, followed by Franziska von Karma. Klavier recognized Ema immediately from our many visits to the Skye residence. Even after disbarment, Lana Skye had been something of a mentor to my brother, endlessly patient with his pecadilloes.

"Ah, Ms. von Karma. I trust you haven't been too harsh on the _Fräulein_."

As this story will make clear, my brother is a smart man, but not always a wise one.

"Don't call her that," barked Franziska von Karma. She'd replaced her whip with a stun baton, and was doing _far better at_ not using it in anger, but I shivered for my brother's safety nonetheless. von Karma was not to be trifled with.

Skye listened with downcast eyes. "Um. Is that really Gavin?"

"You expected someone less sexy?" asked my brother - hopefully rhetorically.

"No, just... a real defense attorney. Is this really okay?"

von Karma shrugged. "It will have to be. Mr. Omnia has considerable clout with the government, and he has... insisted on _appointing_ a Gavin to this job. For your sake, he said. And since one Gavin is away..." (Oh! I could hear the contempt in her voice, "one Gavin, the _lesser_ Gavin, is away." But I refused to be baited.)

"...the remaining Gavin must step in. The show _must_ go on," said Klavier.

"'s not a show," muttered Ema, but Klavier paid little attention.

"My guitar," he said, "would never forgive me if I let down a damsel in distress!"

"I hope you're taking this seriously," said Ema.

Seeing that this exchange was headed nowhere relevant, Franziska continued explaining. "The nature of this tribunal is unusual. No spectators in the gallery, not even the defendant's sister. But to provide ' _some modicum of transparency,'_ to quote His Honor, the defense will be permitted to accompany me on my investigation and supervise any questioning. That seems equitable. Don't you agree?"

Ema Skye looked up at Klavier for confirmation. Good. She was already beginning to think of him as her attorney.

"We'll see," said Klavier. "But it's far, far more than most defendants get. And my brother, the 'coolest defense in the West,' can assist?"

"The Prosecution will even provide a live camera," said von Karma, twirling her stun baton, "So he may do so more effectively. I intend to ensure that this trial is _perfectly_ evenhanded - there will be no appeal on any grounds. None."

A defense attorney trained in the old ways would have known to question this benevolence. But Klavier accepted the camera blandly, almost as if it were his due. He should have realized - and perhaps, in his heart, he did realize - that however von Karma's behavior had softened, she gave nothing freely and bowed only to necessity.

"Then if the _Fr_ \- if Ms. Skye will have me, I'll gladly take the case."

"...Okay," said Ema.

The paperwork was filled out, Lana Skye was notified, and Ema began to tell her story.

 **Vignette 8: Saturn Technologies, Night-Time**

 _Saturn Technologies, east wing, fourth floor, the night Dr. Johann Palmstroem died._

Ema Skye shone a flashlight down a gloomy hallway, sweeping the beam over walls and doors painted a morose, institutional blue.

As befit a cadet hoping to rise in the ranks, she tried to observe everything methodically and scientifically, if only for practice. There was little to see. Although Vincent had demanded a special security detail, and somehow had enough clout with the higher-ups to get one, the night wore on entirely uneventfully.

"TEN O'CLOCK AND ALL'S WELL!" shouted Ema, trying to break the numbing silence, wishing she'd brought a snack or something. She was bored out of her skull.

When she'd first heard of this field position at Uncle Johann's lab, visions of big, mysterious machines with blinking lights buzzed into her brain right away. Uncle was the kind of researcher who gave the fantastic title of "mad scientist" real credibility. But now it looked like the closest thing she was going to get to _science_ on this job was timing the hollow echoes of her footsteps. She'd already spot-checked her route for burglars and transients, and neither were in sight.

 _No, no, keep observing, keep looking,_ she told herself. How much of this place was still unchanged, after all these years? There were still emergency cabinets on the walls, and decades-old fluorescent lights, all dark, protruded from the ceiling at regular intervals. Ema had shut them off herself earlier this night, using with the light key that dangled from her belt next to her walkie-talkie and empty holster. Now the only illumination came from her flashlight and a few traces of moonlight through the dusty blinds at the end of the hallway. Her beam moved from the blinds to the far door on the right, which bore a sign labeled "ANIMAL TESTING."

She paced over to the animal testing room, which had been a doctor's office and exam room years before, rattled the handle, and found it unlocked. How careless. With a little sigh, she fished around on her keyring and tried the keys one at a time. No matches. Unsurprising, as she'd been given minimal access to the higher-security labs. Uncle Johann said they were doing fly and mouse work in there, so it wasn't safe to let just anybody in. She'd just have to scold someone in the morning, and leave it be...

Alhough... if she were to take a little peek inside at the top-secret science stuff there, would anyone ever know? It'd get her mind off things, anyway, and what if there were mutants inside? Big fly mutants?

She had to check. It was her duty as a concerned citizen.

A few moments of fumbling near the door found the light switch, and she blinked as her eyes adjusted to the sudden fluorescent brightness.

"Howdy, mice," she muttered. "Hi, flies."

The Animal Testing room was a largish lab, lined with cabinets and shelves stacked tall with fruit fly vials, starchy food flakes, and electronics.

A translucent plastic mouse cage with a whirring ventilation fan sat on the big table in the center of the room, next to a steel box studded with knobs and audiovisual feeds. But Ema could see that, animal testing aside, this wasn't a room where mice were normally kept in large numbers or for very long. There was hardly any reek of urine or musk, for one thing.

In the back of the room was a desk with an obsolete-looking computer with a battered optical mouse, a can of pencils and paintbrushes, and a carbon dioxide pad. Thinking back to her undergraduate days in Europe, Ema concluded that this is where the researchers sorted their fruit flies, knocking them out with CO2 then brushing them neatly into vials. She'd been a dab hand with a fly brush herself for a while, quickly parceling out the dark-banded, hook-kneed males and bulbous females into anaesthetized piles. But as she absently twirled a paintbrush in reminiscence, a squeak from behind her back caught her attention.

A gray-and-white lab mouse ("agouti" is the term), the sole occupant of the cage in the middle of the room, peered out at her inquisitively. And while this might ordinarily have been filed under "adorable but rather normal," there was something odd about this mouse.

It was wearing a brass harness, a collar that hung over its neck and looped around its front legs. Around the level of its shoulders, or whatever the rodent equivalent of shoulders were, three bright green glowing LEDs were embedded in the metal. Apparently, the animal had acclimated to the device, because there were no signs of scratching or rashes around the edges. It was probably just as well the mouse was caged alone; another mouse would've surely gnawed at it.

Why would you put a metal harness on a mouse? To attach a leash? To walk it? Or, Ema mused, was it some kind of cyborg implant, an attempt to create a murine Darth Vader piece-by-piece? And nearby, protruding up through the wood chips on the floor of the cage, stood a tiny tripod with a flashing green LED at its summit. A mouse-surveying stand? A microphone for mouse karaoke?

And there was something unaccountably familiar about the mouse as well...

At this point, it would have been thematically appropriate for Ema to have said "Curiouser and curiouser," or possibly "Oh, my paws and whiskers." But she didn't. She merely pursed her lips, shrugged, made a mental note to ask someone about the mouse, turned on her heels, switched off the light, and stepped back out.

She stood once more to the far end of the hall, by a row of wooden chairs with double-helix scrollwork. And as she lifted the blinds to look down through the window at a hillside three stories below and a starry sky above, and the moonlight glinted off the carved DNA strands, and she thought about the strange problem of the mouse, she remembered.

Fourteen years before, she and her sister sat in those chairs, waiting for the bad news. Gradually, the memory filtered back.


	2. Vignette 3

**Vignette 3: The Bad News (or, Young Franziska Investigates)**

Disappearance can be far crueler than death, and at the age of five, Ema Skye understood neither.

She ran her nails along the chair's carvings, click-click-click, back and forth. Lana clutched her other hand tightly. They wanted to go home, but home was wherever Aunt Alice was, and that was currently unknown. Sitting on the floor beside them, knees drawn to his chest, Vincent Omnia stared down the hallway at the investigation team. They were talking about his brother. It sounded bad. An old lion of a man, towering even over the other adults, shouted orders at policemen, and a young girl with blue hair scowled together with him, arms crossed.

"Is Dr. Henry done yet?" asked Ema of nobody in particular. She hoped Dr. Omnia wasn't still angry at Aunt Alice; they'd been shouting a lot that morning. She'd told the tall man - the prosecutor - about this, and he'd smiled in a way that made her wish she hadn't mentioned it.

"I told you, the police are still talking to him," said Lana, maintaining a stoic front. "He'll be out soon. You're making Vince nervous."

To unsettle Vincent, who was only a year Ema's senior, was not difficult. "They think did Henry something wrong," he said. "That guy. That von Karma guy. He's saying stuff about Henry."

"Let's not jump to conclusions, all right?" said Lana, though she was already visualizing the impending disaster in her head. Even as a cadet at the police academy, she could recognize what Manfred von Karma's presence meant. From what she'd gathered, the only people who'd accessed this part of the building when Aunt Alice vanished were the Omnia brothers. Uncle Johann had been stuck in traffic, and few others came in on the weekend. And since even a von Karma would hesitate to accuse a six-year-old of murder or kidnapping, that left Henry Omnia as the sole suspect.

Sole suspects fared poorly in von Karma cases.

But perhaps it wouldn't even come to trial! Manfred von Karma hadn't maintained his perfect win record by taking every case that crossed his path. Without Aunt Alice's body, the most the Prosecution could say was that Henry had used some unknown method to erase her from existence, or at least the immediate area. And if Aunt Alice turned out to be alive after charges were filed - fallen out a window and concussed to a fugue state, perhaps? - it would be the greatest blunder of von Karma's career.

"No," said Lana, "He's definitely not going to arrest Dr. Omnia today. He might have more questions later." Once von Karma had found or fabricated evidence, anything was possible.

"Questions? Why?" asked Ema.

"To help him find Aunt Alice."

Reassured somewhat by Lana's expert opinion as a student detective, Ema ruminated quietly until Dr. Omnia's office door swung open. The man who'd introduced himself to the children as Detective Tyrell stepped out, followed by Henry. He looked downcast, but he wasn't in handcuffs. "If you think of anything," said the detective, "tell us. The longer she stays missing, the harder this gets. The forensic guys'll take your prints and DNA while we talk with your other partner."

Henry nodded and forced a smile at Vincent and Ema, before being led away by a forensics tech. Ema waved back, but Vincent only sighed. So Detective Tyrell knelt down on one knee and addressed them both.

"Hey. You've been real patient. I know it looks bad, but we're gonna figure it all out. I'll talk to your uncle, and then you'll all go home." He rummaged in the pockets of his bullet-riddled trenchcoat and gravely presented lollipops to Vincent and Ema. Both accepted them. Ema fiddled with the wrapper of hers, but didn't open it, just looked up at Tyrell expectantly. Vincent just rubbed the stick between his fingers.

"What if you don't find her?" asked Ema.

A slow shake of the head. "You shouldn't be thinking about that stuff at your age. That's for us adults to do. You're lucky, kids." He chuckled, a deep baritone. "As long as you've got adults to do your worrying for you, everything'll turn out okay."

"Um, there were adults on the _Hindenburg_ ," said Vincent.

"...Maybe so, maybe so. But none of them had my nose for smelling out the bad guys, or my mirror for - "

"Stop wasting time with those children!" shouted Manfred von Karma from down the hall. "They know nothing."

Ema frowned. Manfred von Karma seemed like kind of a jerk. But the girl beside him seemed cool! Although she couldn't have been more than two or three years Ema's senior, it was obvious that she addressed adults without fear or deference. "If Mr. Badd can't question them," said this miniature proto-lawyer, "may I?"

Already turning back to the office, von Karma wordlessly waved his daughter on. With an apologetic mutter, Tyrell rejoined the adult investigation team, trusting Lana to protect the children from Franziska's enthusiasm.

"Name and occupation, each of you!" said Franziska.

"I'm Ema," said Ema, perking up at the prospect of someone to talk to until Aunt Alice was found. "Who're you? Why is your hair blue?"

"I am the prodigy Franziska von Karma. And no questions from the suspects! And you, boy! Who are you?" she said, clapping her hands sharply for emphasis.

"Vincent Omnia," said Vincent. Then, with what surely couldn't have been precocious sarcasm, he added, "Your dad says I know nothing." Lana smiled, and Franziska narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

"How do you three know the victim?" asked Franziska.

"Huh? Victim?" said Ema. Aunt Alice was missing, but she hadn't heard anything about a _victim_.

"Alice Palmstroem," snapped Franziska. "Have you been paying no attention?!"

 _That stops now,_ thought Lana. "Watch it," she said, rising up from her chair to loom over Franziska. "She's having a difficult day." Then, seeing that Franziska was entirely unmoved, she added, "If you alienate everyone you talk to, you won't get far as a prosecutor. She wants to find her aunt as much as you do."

Franziska considered this. In spite of his demanding temperament, her father did know how to be charming when the situation demanded. "Duly noted!" she said, relaxing her posture a little and curtseying. "Let's start over."

"Okay," said Ema, brightly accepting the olive branch. "Why is your hair blue?"

Rare indeed was it for Franziska to meet someone as persistent as herself in pressing a question. "Because my mother's hair is blue. How do you know Alice Palmstroem?"

"So it's DNA?" asked Ema.

"Irrelevant. How do you know Alice Palmstroem?"

"She adopted me and Lana. Mom and Dad had an accident."

This was spoken without obvious distress. Her parents had died when she was only an infant, so Aunt Alice and Uncle Johann were the only guardians she had ever known.

"My condolences for your loss," said Franziska. As her father used that phrase often, it seemed the proper thing to say in such circumstances. "So you've known the victim since then."

"Don't say 'victim,'" said Vincent.

"Fine. What is her relationship to you?" asked Franziska.

"My brother takes care of me," said Vincent. "But she helps. So does Dr. Johann. Sometimes she shows me things in the lab. And he gives me puzzles, too. Lots of puzzles."

The Palmstroems seemed to have an endless well of puzzles for Ema, Vincent, and Lana. To Alice, these problems were a way to tease apart ideas and promote a healthy mind, but to Johann, puzzles and riddles represented something deeper: a way to be _understood_ , to cut away the social rituals, the mazes of signals and counter-signals that he found so tedious.

"I see," said Franziska, frowning with a jealousy she couldn't articulate. "Does your brother have a financial motive? Would he get money if Alice Palmstroem died?"

Lana hurriedly hushed Vincent's reply for fear that he'd say something unfortunate. "Besides being a co-founder of Saturn Tech," said Lana, "Henry didn't have any special financial stake. He wouldn't inherit anything from Alice Palmstroem. He might have gotten a bigger share of the company, but it'd be hard for it to keep going without Aunt Alice."

"That," said Franziska, "will be for a court to decide. After we finish our investigation."

"We? Your dad lets you investigate with him?" It was Ema's turn to be jealous. Lana had never let her come along on field training, not even to see the field. Ema was unsure if the term implied exciting police work, a place with cows and grass, or both, but she wanted to know for herself.

"Investigate? Of course he does," said Franziska, a shade too defensively. "Always. Every time. Let's go to the crime scene!"

"Crime scene?" asked Lana. "How can there possibly be a crime scene?"

"I'll show you!"

Despite an initial attempt at a steady and dignified gait, she soon broke into a skipping dash down the hall. With the others trailing behind, and her father safely absorbed in the questioning of Johann Palmstroem, she flung open the machining room door.

"Here! The suspect says he last saw her here!"

The machining room held a hodgepodge of equipment and reagents. Cabinets of chemicals with obvious spill-marks lined the walls nearest the door, and a fabricator suite took up the entire back half of the room. Between the clutter, the fabricator, and the central table covered in power tools, there was little room to maneuver. Something faintly blue was splashed over the table and floor.

"But just because she was last seen here doesn't mean this is the scene of the crime," said Lana. "If there even was a crime."

"Objection! There was definitely a crime. A big crime," said Franziska. "Kidnapping or murder. We know she came up here. And we know she never left."

"The keycard records for the east wing elevator," guessed Lana.

"Correct," said Franziska. "And the receptionist saw her coming up. She was with Dr. Henry Omnia. They were arguing!"

Vincent nudged the chemical cabinet with his foot. It was open. "What are you saying? My brother wouldn't kill anyone."

"I'm saying," said Franziska, pausing to find the right words, "I'm saying the man killed Alice Palmstroem here! Then he cut up the body with those power tools! And dissolved it in carbon cleaner! They did a luminol test... blood all over!"

Franziska beamed in the face of Lana's horror. Both Ema and Vincent seemed distinctly uncomfortable with this account of events.

"Objection," said Lana, with the barest minimum of force. "The cleaners they use could easily give a false positive. And Vincent, did you even hear any power tools?"

"Yeah. But she was working on invention stuff all morning," he said, pointing to a gold belt, a small gold harness, and two little tripods on the table. The belt and harness looked unfinished, but both tripods had their apical LEDs lit. "The noise was probably her. Really loud, I could hear from Henry's office. But there's no way my brother did that!"

"People always say that," said Franziska. "And then Papa shows that they are wrong."

"No," said Vincent. "It's not because of that. It's just impossible. That's a fact."

"What?!" In a well-ordered world, a hypothesis from a von Karma rightly outranked a fact from anyone else.

"I saw it on TV. You can't dissolve a human body in acid fast at all. And, and what about all the stuff Aunt Alice was wearing?"

Lana was unsure whether to be impressed, or have a serious chat with Henry about the boy's television habits.

"Her body couldn't be melted? Then where did she go?!" asked Franziska.

In spite of the girl's galling tone, it occurred to Lana that intellectualizing the problem might help her keep her own composure. So she took the bait. "What if she left out a window?"

"Henry Omnia threw her out a window?"

"That's not what I said," corrected Lana. But wheels were already turning in Franziska's mind.

"We're high up, so she couldn't just jump... An accomplice! An accomplice!" exulted Franziska. "Henry Omnia knocked her out. Then threw her down to someone waiting on the ground."

Vincent shook his head. "That'd be really, really hard. This place is built in a hill, so the ground's all slanted. You couldn't stand there and catch someone." Though he sounded confident enough in that, his foot began to tap uncontrollably, a tic that always meant his nerves were on edge. Dealing with Franziska was taking its toll.

Lana found this duel of prodigies a little unsettling, but some ratiocinative impulse urged her on. "So no ladders, either. On that grade, they'd probably slip, or at least leave obvious marks in the soil."

"Um," said Ema who'd been silent for the entire exchange. "What about... a helicopter? Uncle Johann says black helicopters sometimes get people."

"That's just one of his notions," said Lana hurriedly. "Aunt Alice told you not to talk about it."

"But what if the helicopters took her away?" asked Ema. On a bad day, Johann Palmstroem could be quite explicit about his elaborate fantasies. What Ema had seen as a normal and even charming facet of her uncle's character, Lana, Henry, and Alice had rightly regarded with alarm.

But Franziska, lacking a few critical pieces of context for these wild claims, saw only the chance to score a lead in the investigation, one that even her father had missed. "The roof! Is there a way to the roof?"

"Maybe the stairs, but -"

Before Vincent even finished his sentence, Franziska had run out the door, found the emergency stairwell, and set off the fire alarm.

"Oh, no," said Lana. Outside in the hallway, Manfred and Franziska argued loudly, with occasional attempts to calm the waters by Detective Tyrell Badd. It was impossible to make out the details over the racket. "Well," shouted Lana to be heard over the fire alarm, "at least we know now that nobody used the stairs. You didn't hear an alarm earlier, did you, Vincent?"

"No," he said, much too quietly given the circumstances. "I was in Henry's office all morning. But no alarm."

Then, quite unexpectedly, Ema shouted, "Mouse!"

"What?" What had distracted her now? Sometimes, Lana wondered if her sister had a some situation-specific version of attention-deficit disorder.

Ema pointed to the hulking fabricator. "A mouse just ran behind there. It was wearing... something weird. All metal and shiny."

Brow furrowing, Lana crouched to peer under the machine. It was too dark to see and too loud to hear, but something was moving there. But why would a mouse be wearing anything? Was it some kind of lab specimen?

"Henry says they test stuff on the mice," said Vincent, then added, noting Ema's look of worry, "It doesn't hurt them. But they don't do it in here. They, um, test in the animal testing -"

The door swung open, interrupting these murine speculations, and Manfred von Karma prowled in. Franziska was not with him; the detective must have taken her off his hands. "Out," he growled. "Out, all of you! Except Omnia. You stay."

So Ema and Lana were escorted by a forensics tech to the lobby, where Detective Tyrell Badd was comforting a sulking Franziska. It was there that they waited for Dr. Johann Palmstroem to come out of questioning about Saturn Technologies and his wife's activities, and it was there that they at last received the bad news.

A thorough search of the surrounding area, including hospitals, buses, taxis, traffic cameras, and the morgue, had turned up not the slightest trace of Alice Palmstroem. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth.


	3. Vignette 8

**Vignette 8: The Four Riddles of Johann Palmstroem**

And so, as cadet Ema Skye ran her fingers over the the wooden DNA strands in the moonlight, she thought back hazily on her Aunt's disappearance years before. The law had, with impersonal efficiency, designated it the IA-7 case. And while IA-7 had not brought her childhood to an abrupt end (for that happened in a flash of lightning years later), it certainly instigated the collapse of her adoptive family. Uncle Johann grew distant and obsessed, and ultimately lost custody of both sisters. Forced to be both sister and mother, Lana Skye bore her responsibility bravely.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of a corpse, IA-7 dragged on for years. Manfred von Karma would no sooner bring an imperfect case to court than he would drop one unresolved if any possibility of solution remained. Over that span, Henry Omnia hired and discarded no fewer than three defense attorneys before settling on one whom he could trust implicitly with his secrets and his life. That, of course, was I. Over the years, I grew close to the Omnia brothers, and it is from their reports that I pieced together much of our narrative.

But let us return to Ema Skye's patrol. As she tried to gather her meandering thoughts, recollection was cut short by the appearance of a light in Dr. Palmstroem's office down the hall. She rose to her feet and crept forward. Had Uncle Johann stayed late? If so, why had the light been off earlier?

Ah, if only she hadn't lent her gun to Felicity! She pulled out her walkie-talkie and hurriedly tried to radio her partner. Nothing but static. Alone and unarmed, she edged closer to the lit door, then knocked twice.

"Hello? Is anyone in there?" she asked, straining to imbue her voice with confidence. "Security!"

A long, tense few seconds followed. Then, on the other side of the door, someone rolled up a chair and undid the bolt. "Come in."

Ema's grip on her walkie-talkie relaxed. It was Uncle Johann, that was all. How threadbare he looked! The years had worn lines of worry into his face, and his crooked glasses and stained jacket gave him the aspect of a man who had fallen and never bothered to get up.

"Hi," said Ema, at once feeling five years old again. A bookshelf of dusty oddities beckoned her into the office - a globe, a bottle of pickled Borginian gormquats, a stuffed rabbit with a pocketwatch, an I HEART NON-DIFFERENTIABLE MANIFOLDS coffee mug, a set of Pac-Man matryoshka dolls... in over a decade, little in the bookshelf had changed.

The same couldn't be said of the rest of the office. The partition walling off the far corner of the room was new, and the caution tape drawn across its open side immediately drew Ema's attention. So did the cabinet safe standing against the east wall, protected by two sturdy locks. One key for Vincent, Ema guessed, and one key for Johann. The same way they keep the sealed authentication codes in a nuclear silo.

"How're you doing?" asked Ema. She'd encountered Palmstroem at the security orientation the day before, but for whatever reason - his discomfort with groups, a sense of guilt, or simple social ineptitude - he had merely nodded wordlessly at her and left, just as he'd left her years before.

"Fine," lied Palmstroem. "Was just taking a nap."

"Sorry to wake you."

Palmstroem shrugged. "Doesn't matter when I sleep, as long as I sleep sometime. Vincent tries to make me keep regular hours, but he's out. So I stay awake until microsleep obtrudes."

"Oh," said Ema, swallowing back a remark on the importance of a steady sleep cycle. "I ran into Vincent at the orientation. Or, well, he ran into me! I was coming in, and he was running out, and he said 'Sorry, Ema, got to run, we'll talk when I get back!' And then he jumped into a cab and zoom, he was gone."

"That's because of the execution."

"What?"

"They're going to execute Henry."

Ema's heart sank. Five years before, she'd heard that the Prosecution had somehow gotten Henry to change his plea to Guilty in the IA-7 case, but for it all to end in his death had felt unreal. Somehow, she'd always held out for even the slim possibility of a mitigated sentence, for the obvious wrongness of this decision to be remedied. What was the point of pleading Guilty if they'd kill you anyway? (I had advised against it from the start.)

"Tomorrow," said Palmstroem. "He's been petitioning for a reprieve. Won't happen."

"I'm so sorry." Ema's gaze fell. "We all hoped... for something, I don't know what."

"For the impossible. Or worse, the intractable," said Palmstroem, rolling his eyes upward in what could have been either exasperation or supplication. "The impossible's my business, but intractable's bad. Not every impossible thing is possible. You have your possible impossibles and your impossible impossibles."

"Yeah," said Ema. Although Palmstroem had a flexible idea of this world's limits, some things were beyond even him. Hurriedly, she changed the subject to science and invention; for both of them, that was always a safe fallback at times like these. "How's the impossibles business, anyway?"

"In a holding pattern," replied Palmstroem. "Finished the prototypes a few months ago." He seemed less proud of this than he might have been.

"Prototypes for what?"

"Alice almost had them done," said Palmstroem, frowning and seemingly ignoring the question. "Without her, it took all we could do to catch up to where we were when she left us. A Red Queen's Race. 'It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.'"

"Couldn't you just finish them from her plans," asked Ema, beginning to suspect that this conversation was a bit of a Red Queen's Race itself. "Whatever they were?"

"The fabricator can carve and engrave the parts, but it can't design them, and some need to be made by hand." Palmstroem gestured at a pile of blueprints on his desk.

Even if Ema could have gotten a clear look at the design, it would have been incomprehensible. The phrase "LEDs show remaining uses, recharge impossible" caught her eye, but its importance was lost on her for the moment. She pressed further. "But you finished them, right? They work?"

"Not safe. Don't want to use them, not even the little one. Might be inevitable, though. Consistency and all that." Palmstroem's exposition bore the same relation to the facts as Picasso's _Violin_ bears to the genuine article. All the pieces were accounted for, but their relations were opaque. Naturally, this made the man particularly well-suited to a mystery - he was a walking Challenge to the Reader. If Johann Palmstroem had never existed, surely I would have had to invent him.

 _(But don't even begin on_ ** _that_** _line of speculation. By all means, you could declare this entire story a malicious confabulation, a means of implicating my brother in a fictitious tragedy._

 _But that would be idiotic._ _I'm bored, but not that bored, and the truth here is unbelievable enough in its own right._

 ** _When it comes to matters germane to this mystery's solution, I narrate reliably._** _Art may well be deception, but cheap tricks are beneath me.)_

"Vincent wants to go ahead," continued Palmstroem in his cryptic manner, "but Henry's dead-set against it. The mouse hasn't taken a position either way." He laughed mirthlessly at a private joke.

"The mouse! So that harness..."

"Doesn't chafe or abrade. Padded. Quite humane."

"Yes, but what does it _do?_ " Deflection in 3, 2, 1...

"The full-scale prototype and the remote are locked in this safe," said Palmstroem, leading the conversation on a random walk once more. "It's not coming out anytime soon."

Then, one awkwardly long pause later, he added drowsily:

"How about a riddle?"

It took a moment for Ema to register the question properly. Perhaps he was just dodging her questions in an insomniac daze, but perhaps not. Riddles were how Johann Palmstroem spoke when he had something important to say. If he ever intended to answer her questions, it might well be in that form. Then again, he might just have been nostalgic for those twilight riddle sessions years ago, when he would sit at Ema's bedside and puzzle her to sleep. Who could tell?

"You're probably won't tell me anything else, anyway, huh," said Ema.

"Can't tell you any more about the belt than I already have," clarified Palmstroem, with great deliberateness. "I mustn't. Not till all the brooks and soldiers run away."

So the riddle session had already begun. "So what's the riddle?"

"Everything. But we'll start with this."

 **Puzzle 1**

 _Even though I'm always here,_  
 _I come around but once a year._

"A calendar?" guessed Ema immediately.

"Not a bad guess. But not it."

After giving this riddle some more thought, Ema was able to hit on the answer.

 _But can you? A hint: for each of these riddles, the answer is a word I've used somewhere in the story prior to now._

 _Stop reading here, and give it a guess before you continue…_

.

.

.

.

.

"I think I know what this is," said Ema. "It's the - - - - -. When you say it's 'always here,' you mean under our feet. But from the point of view of the sun… it comes around once every year."

"That's right," said Palmstroem, picking up a globe from the bookshelf. "As Albert Relativity said, there's no 'better' or 'worse' vantage point for looking at the universe. But it's only human to prefer our own point of view."

Palmstroem's fingers danced over the surface of the globe, pushing in different islands and countries, until it swung open at the equator with a click. From its core, he produced a pocketwatch and a safe key.

"This," said Palmstroem, holding out the watch to Ema, "is the heart of the world." Somehow, the engraved butterfly flitting across the front of the casing looked familiar to Ema, as did the motto on the other side: _TEMPVS EDAX RERVM._

For some reason, Ema's fingertips trembled as she opened the watch. Perhaps surprisingly, it still kept accurate time; Palmstroem must have kept it wound. Pasted inside, opposite the face, was a photograph of Alice and Johann Palmstroem, both looking younger than they'd been when Ema had known them. Gently, Ema shut the watch once more and handed back.

"It's beautiful," said Ema. Palmstroem nodded. Then, after replacing the watch in its hiding place, Palmstroem he retrieved a bag of Snackoos from his desk. The strips of fried dough were decidedly unappetizing, and more than vaguely scatological in appearance. Ema Skye had never tried them before.

"Want one?" he asked, offering Ema a treat for her answer in an act of blatant operant conditioning.

Although she wanted to politely refuse, her belly insisted otherwise. She'd skipped dinner, it noted, and anything coated in that much sugary glaze _had_ to be good. Giving in, she took the proffered treat.

"Hey," muttered Ema as she munched. "Not bad. Actually, that's… really good."

"I think they're going to be reclassified as a Schedule II controlled substance," said Palmstroem. "Better get them while you can. Another riddle?"

"Sure."

 **Puzzle 2**

 _Dark when it's still_  
 _And aglow when it goes,_  
 _Its eye's in its belly,_  
 _Its tail's on its nose._

"It's not a literal animal, is it," said Ema, more to herself than her uncle. Eventually, though, she found the solution. Surely you can manage as much yourself, if you put your mind to it.

 _Stop reading here and give the riddle a guess._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

"It's a - - - - -," said Ema. "Not the kind that runs around and squeaks, the computer kind. The cord at the front is the 'tail,' and the optical sensor that lights up on the bottom is the 'eye'."

"Good, good, I'm going to have to retire that one soon. They're mostly wireless now."

"Speaking of which," said Ema. "I wanted to ask you about something I saw earlier."

"I thought you might," said Palmstroem. "If you're wondering how we keep him fed, the key to the cage is in the safe. Vincent fed and watered him before he left."

"I hope you don't have to get in there in a hurry," said Ema. "Doesn't Vincent have the other safe key?"

"In his office, yes," said Palmstroem. "You're observant tonight."

"So, about the mouse… what does the harness do?"

But rather than clarifying, Palmstroem simply passed Ema a reward Snackoo and offered a third riddle. It seemed, she thought, that Uncle Johann was somehow trying to direct her attention to specific things and ideas. But to what end?

"One last riddle."

 **Puzzle 3**

 _Though mortal rulers rise and fall,_  
 _I shall abide above them all._  
 _I'm black and grim, or proud and bright,_  
 _In weeping veils, or diamonds bright._  
 _But when I beat my drums of dread,_  
 _All men cry, "Hail!" and bow the head!_

Ema turned the riddle over and over in her mind. "All men cry 'hail!'" Could it be...?

 _Once more, stop here, and try to answer the riddle. Continue when you have a guess._

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _._

"It's the - - -!" said Ema. "The hail is literally hail, the diamonds are the stars, and the weeping veils are clouds! Huh… did you write that specifically for me?"

"For Alice, before we got married," replied Palmstroem, and handed over a final victory Snackoo. "We write riddles for each other. Programs, too."

"Programs?"

"The Black King and the Red Queen. Chatbots. Simple AI. She makes hers, I make mine. Then they talk, and we rewrite."

The present tense. Uncle Johann was unmistakably referring to his wife in the present tense. How deep did his denial run?

Setting out to demonstrate the _precise_ answer to that question, Palmstroem flicked on his PC and opened an icon on his desktop – a chess piece. What followed left Ema without words.

It was supposed to be Aunt Alice.

The program represented her as a stiff, cartoonish avatar in a red dress, on a laboratory background precisely 256 pixels wide and 192 pixels tall. What had surely been meant as tribute looked more like mockery. The sprite's lips flapped with small beeps as a message appeared on the screen, one letter at a time: "How are you doing tonight?"

"I've been keeping her updated until Alice returns," said Johann, a sentence that was deeply unfortunate in at least three distinct ways. "We talk every night."

He typed a keyword: "Fine."

"I'm glad you're okay, Johann. Don't forget to take your medication. I'll be home soon."

Another keyword: "Home."

"I hope you're keeping it in order. I want to see it ship-shape when I get back!"

The grotesque absurdity was too much for Ema to bear - a self-inflicted haunting. "Um, I think, um… maybe we can look at this another time," she said. "I… I really need to go. Thanks for the riddles!"

Palmstroem frowned and fruitlessly readjusted his glasses, nonplussed. He had bared an embarrassing secret to his niece, and been met only with bewilderment and barely masked pity. She would understand in time. But for now, another nap was in order. "Thanks for stopping by," he said.

"Um, anytime," said Ema, stepping back a little. What was she even supposed to say now? She had understood in some vague intellectual way that Johann Palmstroem was obsessive and odd, but not like this. This was scary and sad at the same time. She tried to come up with a word for that, and rejected both "sadry" and "tearrifying" offhand. "I'll... just be going now."

Palmstroem nodded and set a pillow on his desk, then ushered Ema out.

 **Puzzle 4**

 _As Ema left, the deadbolt slid into place behind her._

 _At this juncture, it would be both tiresome and heavy-handed to write:_  
 _"That was the last time that Ema Skye saw her Uncle Johann alive._ "

 _But, of course, it was._


End file.
